The BirthStrike Facebook page also functions as a kind of support group, said Blythe Pepino, 33, a London-based musician who founded BirthStrike in 2018. Members post about having to break up with partners who still want children, or how to cope with the emotional turmoil of staying childless. Pepino herself went through a grieving period after she decided not to have kids, she said, and described a sense of “emptiness” when she imagined what kind of parent her partner might be, or rubbed a pregnant friend’s swollen stomach.
“When you look at the environmental crisis through the lens of BirthStrike, it’s a real shock to the system,” Pepino said. “You’re straight into how existential it is. You can’t creep around it.”
Mason Cummings, 34, said he almost breaks out in tears when he thinks about his nieces, a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. Cummings, a producer for the Wilderness Society who lives in Durango, Colo., had a vasectomy in 2016 after deciding that he couldn’t “morally bring a child into a world that doesn’t have a secure future,” he said.
Anna Jane Joyner, 35, a consultant and writer, moved home to Perdido Beach, Ala., a few years ago, when she became worried the area wouldn’t survive catastrophic climate change. Around the same time, Joyner resolved that she would not have children, she said, less because she hoped to help mitigate climate change than because of the “selfish” worry that her child wouldn’t be safe.
Joyner had always expected to become a mother, she said, and still struggles with anger over her sense that she could not responsibly plan on having children. “It enrages me that this is actually something I have to consider,” she said.
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Many of these stories start with an aha moment, often stemming from the United Nations climate report released in October 2018 that depicted a strong risk of an early climate crisis. Jessica Johannesson, 34, a writer and bookseller in Bath, England, recalled scrolling through her phone in bed on a Sunday morning, seeing headlines about the report, and thinking “Anyone who is born into this world is in danger,” she said. A few months later, she signed the BirthStrike declaration.
When Johannesson joined BirthStrike in 2018, it was the year she and her partner had planned to have a baby, she said, and they often talk about what sort of international action on climate change she’d need to see in order to reverse her decision. “I’d be thrilled,” she said. “It would make me so happy. But it would take a lot.”
Dani Blum is a news assistant at The New York Times.